Mapping Homo/Transphobia: The Valorization of the LGBT Protection Category in the Refugee-Granting System
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Mapping Homo/Transphobia:
The Valorization of the LGBT Protection Category in the
Refugee-Granting System
Calogero Giametta
Laboratoire de Sociologie (LAMES), Aix-Marseille University
calogiame@gmail.com
Shira Havkin
Institut Convergences Migration (ICM)
shira.havkin@gmail.com
Abstract
A burgeoning interest in lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans (LGBT) rights has been noted to raise among
the World Bank and supranational institutions such as the EU Parliament dealing with the allocation of
monetary funding, as well as within the corporate world at a global scale. The LGBT acronym thus gains
new meanings, as it is used and valorized by capital institutions and corporations. Importantly, the re-
signification of the LGBT category has also occurred within the system of international protection and
immigration policies at a time of strong immigration restrictions. In this article, we examine how
neoliberalism reshapes the LGBT signifier as a valorized protection category by looking at the case of
asylum for gender and sexual minorities within EU geopolitics. By specifically analyzing the French
asylum system, we want to address the question of why and how refugee-granting processes erase or
flatten locally-situated queer histories, experiences and social worlds. We argue that it is important to
move away from an analysis aimed at reinforcing the ‘sexual democratic’ values of some countries versus
what is cast as the ‘cultural homo/transphobia’ of others. Through a particular attention to the mapping
of homophobia, the article will aim to unpack how queer asylum claimants are situated in a giuridico-
legal interstice from which they cannot challenge a colonial structure of thought about the schematic
geography of homo/transphobia.
Published with Creative Commons licence: Attribution–Noncommercial–No Derivatives
Mapping Homo/Transphobia 100
Keywords
LGBT; refugees; asylum seekers; asylum systems; map of homophobia
Introduction | LGBT Asylum: Widening or Restricting Protection?
Queers1 have recently become the recipients of international protection through the asylum
system (Akin 2017, Murray 2014, Spijkerboer 2013). Yet, there exists a discrepancy between the
widening of refugee protection, through the inclusion of sexual orientation and gender identity as grounds
of asylum, and the ever-more restrictive practices that define the asylum system in Europe and elsewhere
in the Global North (Giametta 2018, Kobelinsky 2012a, Salcedo and E. Fassin 2015). In this conjuncture,
what was the convergence of socio-political and economic factors that made this queer inclusion happen?
And what are the stakes with the geographical representational politics of LGBT inclusion/exclusion on
both global and national scales? These are the questions animating this paper, which by bringing to the
fore some of the paradoxes of ‘inclusion’, will attempt to flesh out the working of the systematic
suspicion characterising the immigration administration under neoliberal democracies.
This article emerges from our theoretical considerations based on the ethnographic work we
conducted at different times with queer refugees, immigration lawyers, refugee support workers, and
immigration officials. Many of the respondents we encountered during our fieldworks obtained legal
protection and were finally granted refugee status. But this was only the beginning of their trials and
tribulations to find their feet in the social worlds available to them in the French society. After going
through the ordeal of asylum, they found themselves on their own facing racism and homo/transphobia
in France. Considering this context, we are not attending to the variability of success rates of LGBT
asylum claims, but rather we chose to focus on how the asylum process reveals the reproduction of the
constraining narratives of sexualities organized through hierarchies of nation, race, sex and gender
expression. Analyzing the processes producing these narratives and hierarchies about places and
identities will help us reveal complex and nuanced lived experiences, as opposed to dominant rescue
narratives of LGBT refugees fleeing homophobia.
More precisely, we elaborate on the data we collated from our semi-structured interviews with
24 decision-makers, lawyers and migrant support organizations (Havkin) between 2018 and 2019, and
interviews with 20 asylum seekers (Giametta) between 2015 and 2017 in Paris and Marseille. Further,
an important part of the text is based on our analysis of legal texts and judgments of LGBT asylum cases.
As the fieldwork was conducted in France, the article’s focus will be the French context, yet it is
noteworthy that the processes we will examine throughout are similarly articulated within other EU
countries and the US. In order to grasp the intricacies of the geography of asylum and the mapping of
homo/transphobia, we proceed from analyzing the global scale to subsequently shift to the national one,
in which we seek to uncover how sexuality and modernization ideals circulate within France’s asylum
system. From this multi-scalar perspective our focus will stay on asylum and its transformations and
entanglement with three processes: i) the general dynamic of asylum restrictions; ii) the neoliberal
1
We are using the term ‘queer’ and ‘LGBT’ interchangeably when referring to gender and sexual minorities in the text.
Whilst the most used term by organizations and institutions is LGBT, or LGBTI, we choose to use queer to distance our
language from the institutional one, and emphasize our theoretical dialogue with queer scholarship on the geopolitics of
homophobia. It is also important to note that we do not use these terms as identity categories through which people self-
identify.
ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, 2021, 20(1): 99-119 101
administrative restructuring of asylum procedures and institutions; iii) and the capitalistic and democratic
valorisation of the LGBT category.
In the first part of the article we aim to unpack the ‘LGBT’ acronym as a protection category
under financialized global capitalism with a focus on asylum. Here we want to think through how this
inclusion to protection leaves the structural problems around global inequalities directed at queers
unchallenged, and how it participates in producing world maps that fix a binaristic cartography of
homo/transphobia. In the second part, we will analyse the shifting character of asylum practices vis-à-
vis the recent expansion of refugee protection categories to LGBT people in France, and how queers are
naturalized as particularly deserving of international protection whilst simultaneously being subject to
structural suspicion. We will then look at how, in the realm of suspicion, the production of knowledge
about LGBT refugees in the asylum system demands them to embody the global cartography of
homo/transphobia.
Across political debates in Europe, which cast migration as a negative phenomenon (Castels, de
Haas and Miller 1993, Gill and Good 2019), the right of asylum is under attack, and those who defend it
often evoke it as an antidote to the uncivilised mores of those countries that do not subscribe to it. This
mostly serves to put into relief moral ‘values of providing shelter…a two-thousand-year old tradition but
also as a responsibility to respond to international standards regarding fundamental rights’ (Borrillo and
Mecary 2019 in Libération). It is to this liberal Judeo-Christian inflected worldview, positing asylum as
an important instrument of democracy, to which we will be critically turning in this article. When critical
commentators discuss queer asylum, there is a recurrent focus on critiquing the stereotypes about sexual
orientation and gender identities, the institutonal West-centric biases, or the administrative practices of
asking intrusive questions about claimants’ sexuality (Dauvergne and Millbak 2003, LaViolette 2009,
Chelvan 2011). Albeit these are important aspects to address when looking at the asylum system, we aim
to shift the focus from the ‘bad practices’ of asylum to the more structural question of why and how
refugee-granting processes erase or flatten locally-situated queer histories, experiences and social worlds.
Following queer scholarship on the geopolitics of homophia and homosexuality (Edenborg 2018, Puar
2007, Rao 2014), we contend that it is important to carry out an analysis aimed at nuancing the knowledge
about the ‘sexual democratic’ (E. Fassin 2010) values of some countries versus what is cast as the
‘cultural homo/transphobia’ of others. Thus, how are queer asylum claimants put in a giuridico-legal
interstice which makes them into examples of the schematic geography of homo/transphobia?
Global Capitalism and ‘Sexual Humanitarians’: Moulding the Figure of the LGBT Asylum Seeker
We understand the specific protection mechanism of asylum as being embedded in a larger
political economy logic, which endorses the project of fighting discrimination and safeguarding
neoliberal values all at once. At an international political level a dialectic process has been set in motion
concerning sexual politics. On the one hand, Western liberal countries have used the discursive strategy
of ‘externalizing homophobia’ (Puar 2007), by presenting homophobia as relegated to other parts of the
world. On the other hand, some countries from the Global South and East have ‘externalized
homosexuality’ by casting homosexuality as antithetical to the endemic socio-cultural values of these
countries, framing it as a contaminating import from the West. However, this binaristic world division
denies the histories of gender variance, same-sex desire and practices in different historical times and
geographical locations (Awondo, Geschiere and Reid 2012) while white-washing evidence of rising
homo/transphobia throughout most northern hemisphere democracies.
At this historical conjuncture, global capitalism has produced a discourse of saving women and
queers within both the Global North and South, as feminist and queer scholarship have amply explored
over the past three decades (Farris 2017, Haritaworn 2012, McClintock 1995, Mohanty 1988, Puar 2007).Mapping Homo/Transphobia 102
This, however, is not new to the working of capitalism under imperialism, colonialism and slavery, in
that sexual politics has long been a way of justifying the subalternisation of racialized people through
imperial projects, practices of dispossessions, and military interventions (Spivak 2013, Stoler 2002). The
logic of saving women and queers from the impoverished parts of the world manifests itself in two ways.
On the one hand, through intervention measures within these locations via the actions of NGOs and
International institutions thus implying a movement towards them, that is, ‘going out to save them at
home’. On the other hand, when women and queers manage to cross the migration borders, they might
become the recipients of humanitarian benevolence and thus given shelter through various protection
mechanisms in the global North—here the idea is of ‘receiving them, as they cannot be saved at home’.
Let us first expand on the logic of ‘going out to them’. The interest in LGBT livelihoods does not
only sit with the promoters of human rights and democracy, nor with humanitarian ‘rescue’ initiatives in
the Global South (Gosine 2018), but also among development institutions in the Global North. In recent
times, substantial research efforts have been put to the service of understanding the links between LGBT
rights and development. Drawing on critical development scholarship, Christine Klapeer shows how
LGBT people became progressively included as recipients of development projects. She contends that:
‘while queers have long been seen as unproductive to development, [they] are now constructed within
the new frameworks as ‘temporal’ and ‘cultural brokers’ who are able, due to their embodied modernity,
to break willingly with their ‘time’ and ‘culture’’ (2018: 107), thus contributing to instill ‘progress’ into
their societies. The congruence between sexual modernization and development is also propelled by
political leaders in the West and actors in the world of global Financial Institutions, such as the World
Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). These institutions have recently started to commission
research, critique and intervene upon the problem of homophobia within impoverished regions of the
globe, following the assessment that homophobia (as a specific form of social discrimination) is ‘bad for
business’. In his article Global Homocapitalism (2015), Rahul Rao acutely notes that the Bank, by
forgetting about its history of partnering with faith-based organisations in Sub-Saharan Africa, at the
forefront of the moral panics about sexual minorities, sees homophobia as a cultural problem of certain
countries without self-examining and explicitly addressing the very material socio-economic conditions
that co-produce hostility and moral panics towards queers (2015: 45-46). This historical amnesia serves
to externalize the problem of homophobia in culturalist terms. Further, the argument that LGBT inclusion
is ‘good for development’ and ‘good for business’ conceals the violence of capitalism, it understands
human subjects as entrepreneurs and homophobia as an economic structural barrier that ought to be
removed so that the former can prosper.
As per the logic of ‘receiving them as they cannot be saved at home’, it is noteworthy that through
the political fixation of migration as a negative phenomenon across the European Union, LGBT migrants
have occupied a particularly contradictory space amidst the mainstream discourses on immigration cast
by the Global North; they are paradoxically ‘valorised’ and read as ‘suspects’ at the same time. Valorised,
because potentially perceived as worthy of state protection in socio-political contexts in which the
protection of women and gender and sexual minorities’ rights is increasingly considered as a priority of
neoliberal democracies. Suspects, as in the eyes of political immigration institutions, they remain
threatening numbers in the statistics of new arrivals and ‘guilty’ of crowding or ‘invading’ the national
space (Puwar 2004). From this it emerges that the dynamics of control to which they are subject prevail
over those of protection of which they could avail themselves.
The vastly represented figure of the ‘LGBT refugee’ in the media, the democratic values of
gender and sexual discourses, the global capital institutions’ interest in fighting homophobia have all
clearly contributed to create a heightened sensibility towards queer asylum seekers in the Global North.
At the same time, they have also participated in reinforcing the binary division between theACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, 2021, 20(1): 99-119 103
homo/transphobia at work within what are cast as ‘refugee-sending’ countries and ‘refugee-receiving’
countries.
New Maps: Visualizing Homo/Transphobia Globally
The exercise of mapping through global indicators and measures appraising homophobia or
homo-friendliness can be inscribed into a long cartographic history of dividing the world into places of
‘progress’ on the one hand, and uncivilisation on the other (Browne et al. 2015). By focusing on the
modernization frameworks that undergird developmental practices, citing Escobar (2012) Klapeer argues
that processes of categorization, classification and identification of nations and societies are predicated
upon an ‘imaginative geography’ of the world that allows experts to classify problems and formulate
policies for the ‘under-developed other’ (2018: 108). Today there is a growing interest in measuring,
calculating and mapping homo/transphobia globally, which has translated into a burgeoning scholarship
from the disciplines of critical geography (Browne et al. 2015), development (Klapeer 2018) and
international relations (Rao 2014, 2015). This scholarship has shed light on the homonationalist frames
that connect humanitarian/development agendas to LGBT rights.
In their research project ‘Making Liveable Lives: Rethinking Social Exclusion’, Banerjea and
Browne (2018) explored how LGBT friendliness is measured on global scales. They studied 39 entries
published by corporate entities and LGBT organisations (from ‘gay friendliness indexes’ to lists such as
‘the world’s worse places to be gay’), classifying and ranking countries according to their perceived
homo/transphobia or LGBT friendliness. Among other things, they criticize the focus on law/human
rights emphasizing the understanding of progress as inextricably linked to legal protection, marriage and
decriminalization (2018: 173). Other commentators also provide critical analyses of the Eurocentrism of
this mapping, in which Western countries appear as the ‘prototype’ of homo-tolerance (Klapeer 2018:
108), giving rise to representations that are ‘not only problematic understandings of sexuality, but also
simplistic deployments of the very notion of ‘place’’ (Rao 2014: 181).
The global maps released by the International LGBTI Association (ILGA) are among the most
widely circulated representations of this type of cartography. For the purposes of our analysis we will
initially turn our attention to the ILGA World map2. The map in fg. 1 from 2017 shows where
criminalization, protection and recognition laws for LGBT people are enacted. This map exceeds what
it is there to represent, that is, the criminalization of homosexuality, and it becomes more about what it
stands for, that is, the fact that homo-transphobia is still present in the world and specifically so in some
geographies. Relegating homo-transphobia exclusively to the non-West misrepresents both the West and
the rest of the world. This readily casts homo-transphobia as a problem of certain countries, thus
obscuring the sociological reality concerning how and where homo-transphobia occurs. Here the notion
of progress, as in progressive sexual mores, ought to be looked at not only through a spatial prism but
also a temporal one; these countries are not seen to be ‘there yet’ or they are now what western
democracies were in the past (Kulpa and Mizielinska 2014).
2
Source: https://ilga.org/maps-sexual-orientation-lawsMapping Homo/Transphobia 104
Figure 1: ILGA map showing sexual orientation laws in the world, 2017.
Another example of this kind of mapping can be found on PlanetRomeo, a gay dating online
platform, which published a global ‘gay happiness survey’ in 2015. This example is illustrative of how
even when such mappings do not focus on legal frameworks, but on the lived experiences of surveyed
queers, they can produce and circulate similar flattening representations of global homo/transphobia and
LGBT friendliness following the same neo-orientalist logic. Using data given by their users to rank the
‘happiness’ of gays around the world, PlantRomeo created this visualisation 3 (fg. 2) of what they term
‘gay happiness index’.
3
Source: https://www.planetromeo.com/en/care/gay-happiness-index/ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, 2021, 20(1): 99-119 105
Figure 2: PlanetRomeo map showing what they cast as ‘gay happiness index’ across the
world, 2015.
Here a formula is used to calculate a country’s ‘happiness rate’, taking into account participants’
answers concerning a wide range of topics, from partnership to abuse, going through their self-acceptance
and coming out experiences, moving behaviours, discrimination, bullying, perception of change, life
satisfaction and so on. Methodologically this survey has a number of flaws, for instance concerning its
attempt to produce knowledge about countries or regions where the number of participants is extremely
low. Yet this mapping is interesting to us because of its explicit focus on ‘gay happiness’ and how through
the discourse of happiness, or lack thereof, participants enunciate their embodied experiences of gayness
exactly as one would expect; from the ‘living hell’ of a participant in Algeria to the feelings of
‘acceptence’ and ‘luck’ of a UK-based one. Further, this map highlights the cohort of unlikely actors
participating in producing these representations--today it is not only LGBT-focused NGOs but also
commercial firms and hookup websites that can present themselves as sexual humanitarian actors,
bringing the opportunity of achieving self-fulfillment and happiness to the ‘homo-suffering’ parts of the
world. It is noteworthy that this mapping is a clear visualisation of the values intrinsic to neoliberal
rationality that rest on narratives of individuality, freedom and social progress through which the
discourse of happiness, although not manifestly, is ensnared in capital-oriented subjectivization,
opportunities and life-plans.
Although the gay happiness map does not directly address the respondents’ material conditions
of life, it is revealing to highlight the striking similarities between this map and mappings showing the
global distribution of wealth. Fg. 3 shows a map4 (from 2018) drawn up by the multinational investment
4
Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Countries_by_mean_wealth_per_adult_in_2018.pngMapping Homo/Transphobia 106
bank, Crédit Suisse5, which divides the world according to the mean wealth per adult in each individual
country. The same colours as in both the ILGA and PlanetRomeo maps are applied here; red,
yellow/orange, green whereby we quickly understand that the greener the better, the redder the worse.
Most of Africa, the Middle East and South-East Asia in these maps are characterized by a vivid red,
whereas most of Europe, North America and Oceania are conspicuously green-lit. Although these maps
are not referencing to each other, once they are put side by side one can readily note the invisible threads
connecting gay happiness (and suffering) with rights frameworks, material living conditions and a
common-sense understanding of human happiness. This way of visualizing the world fixes what the
‘problematic’ countries are both in terms of exiting poverty and providing liberal rights, and these
countries coincide with those parts of the world ‘producing’ refugees.
Figure 3: Crédit Suisse map showing the mean wealth per adult in each country of the world, 2018.
The logic behind creating a ranking system of nations in relation to standardized LGBT-phobia
measures is, however, inherently problematic as it reveals the neo-orientalist nature of this practice. It is
indeed important to think about these mappings as a way of reinforcing the existing hierarchy between
rich/homofriendly countries and poor/homophobic ones, and it is equally relevant posing the question as
to what these mappings produce beyond consolidating this dichotomy; in what project do they
participate? Among other things, the cartography of homophobia, as a representation of the distribution
5
Similarly to Crédit Suisse other banks and financial institutions produce world wealth distribution maps yearly. It is
interesting to note here that in 2013 Credit Suisse was the first bank to initiate an index to track the fiscal performance of
LGBT friendly companies, in so doing it fashioned itself as one of the precursors of the articulation between LGBT rights
and Capital. According the bank the rationale behind this index was not exclusively to do with profit, but to recognize sexual
minorities as active members of the business world. (See: http://en.diversitymine.eu/investing-in-gay-friendly-companies-
the-credit-suisse-equality-index/)ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, 2021, 20(1): 99-119 107
of sexual modernity, informs asylum system’s decision-makers in many ‘refugee-receiving’ countries
today. Through asylum today, LGBT refugees are essentially expected to embody this cartography, thus
becoming the human proof that these differences are precisely locatable geo-politically and culturally.
LGBT: A New Protection Category in Times of Asylum Restrictions
Although the liberal political tradition presents asylum as a guarantor of civil liberties, it is
evident that the asylum system has become much more restrictive (Bohmer & Shuman 2008, Squire
2009, De Genova & Peutz 2010). The hardening of asylum granting as an instrument of international
protection is a general dynamic that started in the mid 1980s in the Global North, in parallel with ever
more restrictive migration policies. As borders were progressively shutting down for economic migrants,
the image of the refugee was also being transformed. Although the refugee definition according to the
Geneva Convention did not change, its interpretation by the asylum administration was largely restricted,
and now it only corresponds to a small minority of asylum seekers (Akoka forthcoming, Coutin 2001,
Zetter 2007). In France, while at the beginning of the 1990s approximately 85% of asylum seekers used
to be granted status, by the mid 2000s almost 85% were denied protection (Valluy 2009).
Until the late 1990s, fleeing homophobia, lesbophobia and transphobia was not considered as a
legitimate reason to be granted asylum in Europe. This, in itself, is not surprising as it was only at this
time that protection against discrimination of sexual and gender minorities was institutionalised in
Europe (Treaty of Amsterdam 1997; Council Directive 2000/78/EC; in France loi n° 2002-73 of January
17th 2002). In France, asylum protection on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity (so-called
SOGI) was granted for the first time in 1997 to a transwoman from Algeria (CE, SSR, 23 juin 1997,
171858, Ourbih)6. This new protection category has become ever more ‘successful’ in recent years.
During the ethnography conducted by one of us (Havkin), a Paris-based lawyer specialised in asylum
revealed:
At first it was anecdotal, in the 2000s I had two or three LGBT cases per year. Today I
have two or three per day. It’s also the legal framework that’s changed, in 2001 if someone
had a homosexual life in a country where it was penalised, he was considered as the one
to blame for his own persecution (interview, September 2018).7
There are no available statistics regarding sexual orientation and gender identity-based claims in
France, however our interviews and observations conducted at the asylum court reveal that this protection
category became ‘successful’ both in terms of a rise in the number of claims on this ground and in terms
of relatively higher protection rates. Commentators focusing on the humanitarization of asylum
emphasize that today one can more easily be recognized as morally legitimate when claiming asylum on
the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity, rather than as a result of political engagement,
religious belief or ethnic belonging (D. Fassin 2013, Ticktin 2011). But as the general rates of protection
6
As sexual orientation and gender identity does not appear explicitly among the five grounds for asylum evoked in the
Geneva Convention (race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group and political opinions), the
recognition of people who fled persecution due to their (real or presumed) sexual orientation or gender identity as refugees
results from a broadening of the definition of ‘membership of a particular social group’. In Europe, this inclusion was
formalised in 2004, when the European Commission declared that a group whose members share the common characteristic
of sexual orientation can be considered as a social group according to the Convention.
7
In order to guarantee all respondents’ confidentiality and anonymity we chose not to give details about their names or
identities in this article.Mapping Homo/Transphobia 108
imply the rejection of about three quarters of asylum claims at the OFPRA level 8, this relative
‘efficiency’ does not mean that all LGBT asylum seekers are granted protection. This new ‘queer
inclusion’ in times of asylum restrictions goes hand in hand with the spread of systematic suspicion, a
main characteristic of an asylum administration which systematically suspects asylum seekers of not
being truly who they say they are (D’Halluin Mabillot 2012, Kobelinsky 2012b). The nexus between
inclusion and suspicion can be readily noted in this excerpt from an interview with a judge of the National
Court of Asylum (CNDA), he stated:
...with the definition of homophobia as an offence in Europe, persecution of sexual and
gender minorities has become a legitimate reason to be granted asylum. The perverse
effect is that since homosexuality is still prohibited in many countries, sexual orientation
became a good argument for seeking asylum. Sometimes it seems that all Senegalese and
Bangladeshi people are gay (interview, September 2018).
The asylum administration thus views the special focus on sexual orientation and gender-based claims
as a way to include and protect, but the efforts are also directed at defining criteria to evaluate the
‘credibility’ of one’s sexual orientation and thus distinguish between ‘real’ and ‘fake’ LGBT refugees
(Kobelinsky 2012a, Salcedo & E. Fassin 2015).
Since 2013 the OFPRA has introduced new procedures stemming from the EU directives for
asylum seekers who carry a ‘particular vulnerability’, among whom LGBT asylum claimants. A new
specialised ‘groupe de référants’ (referral group) became responsible for producing, sharing knowledge
and formalising new tools in order to deal with these new particularly vulnerable groups. In 2018, during
a panel on sexual orientation and gender identity protection at the ‘open house day’ at the OFPRA the
then-director Pascal Brice said: ‘this is our most beautiful and difficult task, to protect people persecuted
in their country because of their sexual orientation, because of who they are’. When interviewed for a
mainstream gay newspaper Tetu, he said: ‘the protection of people because they are homosexual, lesbian
or transgender, is one of our most beautiful tasks and one of the most impossible ones, because it is up
to us to establish the credibility of someone’s sexual orientation’ 9. Yet despite the mainstreaming of the
protection discourse for this specific refugee group, queer refugees are not relieved them from the burden
of suspicion and the ordeal of truth-telling when facing the asylum procedures.
Structures and Strictures of Knowledge and Ignorance in the Context of Suspicion
The restriction of asylum and the drop in the protection granted to refugees over the past forty
years can be explained through the transformation of the asylum procedures and administration and their
entanglement with the systematic suspicion of migrants (Bohmer & Shuman 2018, Schuster 2018). These
processes rest on, and reaffirm, specific structures of expert knowledge and ignorance following a
racializing logic.
Historically, the decrease of the success rate of asylum claims in France is the result of a
progressive shift from a small administration that granted asylum to people coming from specific
countries (mostly in the context of the Cold War), to a more bureaucratized system that distributes
8
At the level of the second instance, the National Court of Asylum (CNDA) the acceptance rate grows up to 36%. See:
https://www.ofpra.gouv.fr/sites/default/files/atoms/files/ofpra_ra_2018_web_pages_hd.pdf
9
See: https://tetu.com/2018/09/27/un-demandeur-dasile-lgbt-na-pas-a-prouver-son-orientation-sexuelle-selon-le-patron-de-
lofpra/. Last Accessed on 20th September 2020.ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, 2021, 20(1): 99-119 109
protection on an individual basis (Akoka forthcoming). Infused with suspicion, the obligation to produce
a personal account of one’s fear of persecution transforms each element of the claimant’s story into an
occasion to doubt and question its entire credibility. Thus, many rejections of LGBT asylum claims are
justified by the fact that the claimant’s account of their LGBT trajectory or their persecution was not
‘personal enough’ and remained too general and schematic. Recently both at a national and European
level, there has been a continuous effort to harmonize asylum criteria and instruction procedures, aiming
to further objectify and homogenize them. But in the current context of systematic suspicion, the
investigation of each application through an ever more formalized procedure turns the inquiry on truth-
telling into a process of lie-detecting (D. Fassin 2013:17).
Some research has been dedicated to the production of Country of Origin Information 10 and the
way in which ‘objective’ expert knowledge about countries, regions, political situations, ethnic or
religious differences and tensions is produced (Murray 2015). The general tendency towards the so-called
‘harmonization’ of asylum assessment led, in France, to a dramatic change in the role of Country of
Origin Information in the past twenty years, as asylum court decisions started to systematically refer to
it. However, in the context of structural suspicion, this type of expert knowledge is largely used to filter
asylum seekers.
The individualization and the so-called harmonization of asylum procedures, in the climate of
structural and systematic suspicion, produce new epistemologies of expertise and ignorance. By
examining the epistemologies of ignorance intrinsic to the asylum process, Bohmer & Shuman write: ‘In
any process of inquiry, whether sympathetic or antagonistic, an interrogator can create a situation in
which an individual is made to appear ignorant of his or her own circumstances’ (Bohmer & Shuman
2007: 607). Among the strategies for producing ignorance, they evoke: ‘stories that are too recognizable
or not recognizable enough’. In this sense, the obligation to present a personal account of one’s
persecution on the one hand, and the production of more homogenized Country of Origin Information
on the other hand, put asylum seekers in a double-bind, as they have to present a story that would fit the
knowledge that the instructors already have, yet be original and personal enough so that it would appear
to be genuine.
Large part of the literature critiquing the disbelief to which asylum seekers are subject locates the
production of ignorance on the side of the asylum seekers, as they are apprehended as ignorant of their
own stories throughout the asylum process (Bohemer & Shuman 2007). Other scholars, analyzing the
asylum system, highlight the racial dimension of suspicion and disbelief addressing asylum seekers of
color (Dos Ventos Lopes Heimer 2019, Schuster 2018). We argue that the production of ignorance of
identities and places is one of the main effects of the asylum system as a whole. Although asylum seekers
and judges are structurally situated in diametrically opposed positions of knowledge, they are both actors
within the specific regime of truth that sustains schematic and exoticizing conceptions about places and
identities. We understand this regime of truth and the epistemologies of ignorance that emerge from it as
an apparatus of domination and oppression. Given the continuities between the contemporary set-up of
asylum regimes and the ongoing racial oppression at the hands of states and institutions to which the
majority of refugees are exposed, it is important to attend to the critical work on the epistemologies of
ignorance that is central to race and critical whiteness theory (Cesaro 2019).
10
Country of Origin Information (COI) refers to information on countries from which asylum seekers originate relevant for
decision makers in the field of asylum. See: https://ec.europa.eu/home-affairs/what-we-
do/networks/european_migration_network/glossary_search/country-origin-information-coi_enMapping Homo/Transphobia 110
Ignorance, as Sullivan and Tuana emphasize, is not merely an accidental by-product of limited
time and resources: in the case of racial oppression, ignorance is consciously and unconsciously
generated for the purpose of domination and exploitation (2007:1). When discussing the epistemology
of ignorance in his book, The Racial Contract, Mills examines the necessity of holding on to ‘structured
blindness and opacities in order to establish and maintain the white polity’ (Mills 1997: 19), which in
this context refers to the position of decision makers as experts. Through his focus on unpacking the
meanings and effects of ‘white ignorance’ (in Sullivan and Tuana, 2007), Mills provides us with a useful
lense to understand the hurdles of credibility on the part of the asylum seekers today, as well as the
paradoxes of producing expertise on the part of the decision-makers.
Immigration officers and judges occupy the positions of experts of places, identities and political
contexts which they know only from succinct reports (mostly from CNDA information sheets, ref-word
reports, NGOs’ reports). Further, within the racialized realm of suspicion, the way they listen to asylum
applicants’ stories is not supposed to let them learn anything new from claimants’ genuine experience of
what has happened to them, but rather to examine the applicants’ credibility according to what they think
they already ‘know’ about their emplaced experiences. In the context of structural suspicion, schematic
conceptions about places and identities can hardly be undone or complexified.
Institutional Expectations of Asylum Seekers to Embody the Cartography of Homo/Transphobia
There is a vast socio-legal and, more recently, sociological literature on asylum highlighting that
during the refugee-granting process LGBT migrants’ emplaced experiences of their sexual orientation
and/or gender identity are perceived as fully knowable. This follows racializing and stereotyping ideas
of what a gay, lesbian or trans life in different parts of the world should look like (Dustin and Held 2018,
Giametta 2017, Murray 2015, Raboin 2017). From the ethnographic fieldwork conducted in France, it
readily emerged that a central problem asylum seekers had to face was proving their ‘credibility’ (Lewis
2014) vis-à-vis an immigration administration that mistrusts them and assumes it already knows what
their experiences should look like:
Officers and judges know nothing about homosexuality and the experience of
homosexuals, let alone in the African context. They rely on general representations or
stories they have heard before and that they consider trustworthy to build a model of what
is credible and what is not (interview with a member of an LGBT asylum support
organization, February 2019).
In some countries, such as Senegal or Mauritania, the repression of homosexuality is perceived
to be depending on the claimant’s neighborhood, living circumstanecs and social class (rather than being
a generalized social phenomen). In these cases, judges look for precise data on forms of persecution on
specialized online sites (CNDA sheets but also refworld and international and local NGOs sites). One
judge from the Court of Asylum said he rejected a claimant from Mauritania whom he did not find
credible because his story did not match the information he had read concerning the situation of
homosexuals in the country. He continued: ‘Mauritania is very hypocritical: the law provides a death
sentence for homosexuality but in fact it is tolerated among men from wealthy background and if they
remain discreet. Yet, the applicant did not know this phenomenon of discretion’ (interview, September
2018). He also said that he rejected a claimant from Nigeria who came from Niamey and said there was
no homosexual life in Niamey while reports show otherwise. Thus the judge ‘knows’ about gay life in
Niamey and about the ‘phenomenon of discretion’ in Mauritania, places and situations he never
encountered and on which he only read reports written by ‘experts’, yet this would suffice to reject the
claimants who do not know what he thinks he knows about the places they come from.ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, 2021, 20(1): 99-119 111
During the same interview, the judge from the National Court of Asylum also described what he
thought the most common gay trajectory of men was; starting from when they first discover their sexual
orientation (usually around 14 years old), to their first homosexual relationship (between 18 and 25) that
generally ends when the relationship is outed (first episode of violence and often migration to another
city). He pointed out some differences in the sexual trajectories of homosexual men and lesbian women.
According to the judge, women rarely have homosexual experiences during adolescence, they would
have their first homosexual relationships later on in life, around 23 or 27 years old. Often the women
would be subject to forced marriage. Thus their narrative would be centred on existential choices: fleeing
forced or arranged marriages. Further, women would often have a single love story, at a later age, whilst
men would have several stories throughout their lives. He ended his confident assessment by saying,
jokingly, ‘you can really become an expert’.
Racist and exoticizing representations of queer otherness were common throughout the
interviews with the judges. These misconceptions vehiculate colonial archives about places and about
what being queer means. A common conception among judges seemed to be that in Arab countries sex
between men is common, as gender-based segregation implies that women are not sexually available to
men. While a UNHCR judge described this understanding as an example of the racism and homophobia
of the asylum system (interview, March 2019), another judge revealed that he rejected the asylum claim
of a man who described his homosexual experiences at the hammams that he frequented and insisted on
the fact that he was exclusively sexually active (interview, October 2018). For the judge, this ‘caricatural
description’, as he described it, shed light on the claimant’s homophobia (the fear to be perceived as
sexualy passive by the court), and therefore it proved that he was not ‘really’ gay.
Mistrust of asylum seekers’ narratives takes many shapes, for instance, during an interview, a
judge criticised another one who, within a hearing at the Court of Asylum, referred to a list of gay bars
in Abidjan that she had found online, asking an asylum seeker whether he knew these places (interview,
March 2019). In addition, some rapporteurs testified that some judges still use information from gay
tourism online sites. It is noteworthy to recount the experience of a Cameroonian asylum claimant we
came across during the research. The claimant provided a straightforward description during his
interview at the OFPRA, he talked about a certain margin of tolerance in nightclubs, especially clubs
frequented by foreigners and the diaspora, and he referred to an ordinary flirtatious dynamic. Here is an
excerpt from the transcription of the interview at the OFPRA:
• Did you go to nightclubs for homosexuals?
• No, that doesn’t exist in Cameroon yet. But in nightclubs there are people who do not live here,
so it’s easier to be yourself (...)
• Can one really be oneself as a homosexual in Cameroonian nightclubs?
• Yes, yes, but not too much (...) not to the point of making people uncomfortable. In some
nightclubs more than in others. There are...in places where foreigners and diaspora go people they
are more flexible with this issue (...)
• How does one express one’s interest in someone?
At this point the claimant describes how gay men may recognise each other:
• It’s through chatting. But if it doesn’t work you stop immediately and you deny everything you
said (...) And when you already know one then you have kind of a network. People know each
other a little.
• How do you evoke this subject in a chat?Mapping Homo/Transphobia 112
• With caution. For example, I’m with someone I like, we chat about everything and nothing,
soccer, nightclubs. When there is some trust we start talking about sex, women. I then send small
signals, ‘I love men’ I say, as if it was a joke. And I see his response when I approach the subject.
If you’re not interested I move on. But if I see that it can work, I can go further.
(Transcript of OFPRA interview, 2017)
This description does not fit with the (mis)conception of the OFPRA immigration officer about
homosexuality and homophobia in Cameroon and thus the claimant is disbelieved. His claim was
ultimately rejected because, according to the officer, he ‘drew an unlikely picture of meetings and the
recognition strategies between homosexuals’. The claimant’s telling of an everyday experience of flirting
interfered with the ideas the officer held of what shape the oppression of same-sex desire should take in
Cameroon. Similarily, we remarked that in many court hearings judges would often ask questions such
as ‘how did you know you could tell him you were gay? Were you not afraid?’ when what the claimant
was describing had clearly been an episode of flirting, and not disclosure. This imagined and fixed idea
of how fear and risk structure homo-sex is what, in many cases, prevents an officer from recognising
someone’s story as true.
‘Happy to be Here?’ The Cartography of Homophobia and its Moral Economy
When questions regarding one’s sexual practices were banned 11 as they started to be viewed as
infringing on the individual’s dignity, asylum interviews became more focused on claimants’ feelings.
While during the ethnography, the majority of immigration officers, lawyers and judges recalled
questions about ‘who is active and who’s passive’ as being bad practice, the same respondents would not
view questions about feelings as intrusive or problematic. Following the shift from facts to feelings, we
would like to ask how the repertoire of expected feelings articulates with the cartography of
homo/transphobia. In other words, we want to look at how asylum seekers’ mobility from ‘homophobic’
to ‘homo-friendly’ countries is supposed to match a flattened narrative about their expected mobility
from suffering to happiness.
When having to tell and write one’s story – to then be officially presented to the decision-making
authorities – asylum seekers need to focus on their past experiences; the very process of writing/telling
becomes a way into their suffering. They need to tell what it is they left behind and why what they left
behind was not bearable to them any longer. During an interview, a CNDA rapporteur stated that: ‘the
questions are generally built on the idea, or the cliché, that the trajectory of LGBT asylum seekers is one
of suffering and difficulties’ (interview, October 2018). The institutional practices of certifying people’s
genuineness and their need of protection produce a space where those who claim a right have to
concentrate on their suffering and to then perform that according to the criteria imposed by Western
liberal sensibilities. Claimants are expected to describe a discomfort, a feeling of difference, rejection,
fear, psychological difficulties.
Many claimants are rejected because their narratives about discovering and living their sexual
orientation and gender identity is not considered ‘personalised’ enough, in the sense that they cannot, or
do not want to provide an intelligible story of suffering. Many asylum seekers describe their coming to
terms with their sexual orientation positively:
11
CJUE, Grande Chambre, 2 décembre 2014, A, B & C c/ Staatssecretaris van Veiligheid en Justitie, Affaires jointes C-
148/13, C-149/13 & C-150/13ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, 2021, 20(1): 99-119 113
• Was it easy for you to accept your homosexuality?
• Yes.
• Didn’t that cause you any problems with your religion?
• Sometimes I would ask myself questions. Then my family told me it was forbidden. The Koran
prohibits homosexuality.
• How do you reconcile your religion and your homosexuality then?
• In fact, since I was in a Muslim country, I was hiding to practice my homosexuality.
• But you didn’t feel any contradiction between the two?
• It disturbed me, but I couldn’t control it.
• When you discovered your homosexuality, how did you feel?
• Very happy.
(Transcript of OFPRA interview, 2017)
Or:
• When you realized that you were falling in love with a woman, what did you feel?
• I felt very well, at peace with myself, like a teenager, I was happy’.
(Transcript of OFPRA interview, 2017)
Or:
• I loved it because I’ve never felt desire before.
(Transcript of OFPRA interview, 2017)
In all these cases, asylum was denied in the first instance although some of them were granted
after their appeal at the Court of Asylum. The officers rejected claimants’ applications stating that they
delivered ‘evasive statements about discovering one’s sexual orientation and their experience of this
difference’.
The expected narrative of suffering while in the country of origin should ultimately lead to a
happy resolution in France. Examining the British asylum context, Thibaut Raboin unpacks how LGBT
claimants must ‘conform to a certain extent to representations of queer happy futures’ (2016: 17) in the
country of arrival. However, Raboin stresses, happiness here is intimately linked to the notion of freedom
as afforded by neoliberal economy with an emphasis on individuals’ choice and possibility for
consumption in the marketplace. In our ethnography it was noted that some asylum claimants provided
a ‘happy ending’ to their migration stories, for instance, when asked about how they felt about their
future in France this Cameroonian refugee replied:
The most important thing is to rebuild myself. I really live what I am. For me it’s the most
important thing because I wasn’t fulfilled. I wasn’t living my life, actually. I’m happy
because I’m rebuilding myself. The most important thing for me is to do what I’m doing,
feeling comfortable with myself. I don’t need to hide if I like someone. I can start all over
from scratch (repartir à zéro).
(Transcript of OFPRA interview, 2017)
Some others fail to provide a ‘happy ending’:Mapping Homo/Transphobia 114
• Since you are in France have you met people?
• No, I stay with my children, I don’t know these places and I’m afraid I’ll do things wrong.
• Have you tried to find meeting places?
• I don’t sleep well, I have nightmares and I don’t have time, I’m not stable.
Yet, the same respondent still felt she had to comply with the expectation to deliver a story about her
journey towards liberation:
• How do you feel since you have been in France about your sexual orientation?
• Yes, I will not hide it, because if I meet someone I like here we can live it fully, without any
problem.
(Transcript of OFPRA interview, 2016)
These recurrent representations of ‘happy saved queers’ may lead to epistemological
misconceptions emerging from the schematic cartography we have discussed in this article, which draws
a neat picture about a homogenous safe space and an imagined monolithic LGBT community. When in
the winter of 2018 a Hijra person from Pakistan was granted asylum, the judges from the Court of Asylum
stated: ‘when asked what he can now do in France, he was able to express his ability to socialise with
members of his community in public places without fear of negative perceptions around him’ (CNDA
decision 2018). While expert knowledge informs the asylum administration about fears, persecution and
suffering through the Country of Origin Information, in this case the judges seem to adopt an idyllic
portrait of tolerance towards gender and sexual minorities, as if France were a safe haven for transwomen,
or as if Hijra people, a specific gender identity endemic to the Indian subcontinent, would ‘naturally’
find a sense of belonging and acceptance within a unified LGBT community. Moreover, the fact that the
judges misgendered the applicant is not only deeply disrespectful, but also particularly ironic in light of
their representation of this person as a ‘happy saved queer’.
Conclusions
In this article we examined the recent emergence of the figure of the LGBT refugee in times of
asylum restrictions focusing on France. Drawing from queer theory applied to geography and
development as well as the sociological literature on migration, we wanted to highlight the contradictions
between the processes of valorization of the LGBT category and the suspicion to which queer asylum
seekers are subject. First, we discussed the incorporation of queers into the international development
agenda as they are now perceived as deserving of protection. Second, this inclusion by global finance
and humanitarian discourses is also countered by the suspicion to which queer subjects in search of exile
are confronted vis-à-vis the immigration institutions of ‘refugee-receiving’ countries. Here, as other
migrants, they are structurally cast as suspects because their presence is construed as a problem to the
restrictive migration policies fixated with lowering numbers of migrants’ arrivals into the European
Union.
We analyzed the binary division between the homo/transphobia at work within what are cast as
‘refugee-sending’ countries and ‘refugee-receiving’ countries through critically referring to maps. In so
doing, we highlighted how these mappings reinforce the existing hierarchy between rich/homofriendly
countries and poor/homophobic ones. In order to discuss the homonationalist logic connecting
humanitarian and development agendas to LGBT rights, we shifted our focus to visual representations
of homo/transphobia through examining global maps. Thus juxtaposing the ILGA World andACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, 2021, 20(1): 99-119 115
PlanetRomeo maps with the map of the global wealth distribution allowed us to foreground the invisible
threads connecting gay happiness and suffering with rights’ frameworks, material living conditions and
a common-sense understanding of human happiness. We looked at this type of mapping as a visualisation
of the values intrinsic to neoliberal rationality that rest on narratives of individuality, freedom and social
progress.
In the last part of the article, we stressed how the binaristic cartography of homo/transphobia
informs filtering mechanisms within the immigration administration at a micro-level. In our discussion
of the changes of asylum we attended to how the transformations of asylum procedures, its
individualization and the so-called harmonization, privileged new forms of expert knowledge about
places and identities. In the realm of systematic suspicion, schematic conceptions about places and
identities can hardly be undone or complexified. Finally, by foregrounding the shift from facts to feelings
that characterize decision-makers’ practices in the assessment of asylum claims, we commented on the
strengthening of the expectations on the asylum seekers to embody the cartography of homo/transphobia,
and provide a credible story of suffering. In this context, we highlighted the double-bind in which asylum
seekers are situated, namely, having to tell a seemingly genuine story about themselves and fitting into
preconceived ideas about identities and places. In doing so, they are made to reinforce the flattening
picture of France as a homogenous safe space for queers, and of their countries of origin as inherently
and culturally homo/transphobic.
For many of the respondents we met during our fieldworks, finding a job, decent housing and
building social connections turned out to be particularly difficult for (often racialized) migrants who are
structurally positioned in the lowest ranks of a society organized through hierarchies of nation, race, sex
and gender expression. Years after obtaining refugee status, many expressed frustration, as they could
hardly find work outside of the devalorized and low-paid precarious reproductive labor sector (i.e. dish-
washing, cleaning, baby-sitting and so on). In this sense, particularly if we look beyond the asylum
process itself, not only schematic representations of the homophobic Other are problematic, but also the
image that France has of itself as a ‘safe haven’ for queers is strongly misleading.
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